Paris cannot abandon Balzac!

Balzac was always changing addresses in Paris, but he did spend seven years (1840–47) at an address in the rue Raynouard in the sixteenth arrondissement. In that time he produced such masterpieces as Une Ténébreuse Affaire, La Rabouilleuse and La Cousine Bette. The house is described by Graham Robb in his wonderful biography of the author (1994) as a "little eighteenth-century house in the suburban village of Passy", where "the landlord filled the empty apartments . . . with a colony of launderers who brought with them the greatest enemy known to writers: noisy children". It has for several decades accommodated the Maison de Balzac, one of apparently only three literary museums in the capital – the other two being the Maison de Victor Hugo and the Musée de la Vie Romantique. The Maison de Balzac receives more than 50,000 visitors a year.

In 2001 the Parisian city authorities were on the point of buying three properties adjoining the property, with a view to extending the cramped museum space. This hasn't happened. . . .

Instead, according to Gonzague Saint Bris, writing recently in Le Figaro, the Mairie is looking to sell the three properties, to take advantage of the buoyant property market in the city. He points out that "these three houses . . . full of charm if dilapidated, could easily be replaced by a building that would crush the maison de Balzac, that ancient 'folly' which, alone, bears witness to what was once the village of Passy, with its terraces going down to the Seine where, at the bottom of his garden, the writer would flee his creditors by taking a riverboat to the centre of Paris". Saint Bris reminds us that the house in Passy is one of only two surviving Paris addresses associated with the writer, the other being in rue Visconti where he set up his printing press (since converted into apartments).

Gonzague Saint Bris is president of the Société Honoré de Balzac de Touraine and the author of more than forty works including the recently published Balzac, une vie de roman, as well as biographies of other nineteenth-century French literary figures. He has also written a book about Michael Jackson, whom he accompanied on a tour of Africa in 1992 (Au Paradis avec Michael Jackson, 2010). He has twice stood as a candidate for the Académie française. In his Figaro piece he makes an eloquent plea to the Mayor of Paris (Bertrand Delanoë – whom he doesn't name) to rethink his decision and to see through a project initiated by his predecessor, suggesting that he would as a result gain "a place in literary history". As he says, "Paris cannot abandon Balzac!"